Hopefully this helps give a better idea of how it works under the hood: https://nitric.io/docs/reference/providers/custom/building-c...

Not just a feature of Pulumi, its just used as the IaC of choice for the out of the box deployment providers. This can be replaced with anything.

At its core Nitric is really a tool to collect infrastructure requirements from an application and those requirements are delivered to a server that is built using the Nitric deployment APIs.

Pulumi doesn't rely on Terraform core at all, and Terraform providers use a bridge[0].

[0] https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-terraform-bridge

No, most of the pulumi providers are wrappers around terraform providers.

The exception are native providers which use new stuff like AWS Cloud Control API.

I'm well aware of that, and what I said is still true.

You might want to look at the repo I linked, check out the source, or hear it directly from the folks at Pulumi if you're interested.

It looks like it's letting you put your application code and Pulumi code in one spot. Why...not really sure, outside of a very short "Hello World".

Not quite,

Nitric infers the necessary cloud runtime by building a spec based on the resources you've imported into your application code.

At deployment time Pulumi is used to provision the resources (because we think it is an awesome tool).

Note that we could have also opted for any other IaC like CDKTF, and that you could either modify our providers or implement your own providers using your IaC of choice.